Selected Recordings

Selected Sheet Music

Notes and Commentary

Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli was one of the leading Italian violinist-composers active in London during the era of Handel. Reportedly a pupil of Corelli in Rome, he arrived in London in or before 1719, worked for a decade as leader of the orchestra at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and subsequently became a successful freelance violinist in great public esteem, whose activity extended to at least 1762. Converting to Anglicanism, Carbonelli married in 1730; in 1735 he was naturalized under the name of John Stephen Carbonell.

“Persons sworn, to be naturalized. Henry Wilckens, John Barnard Hoffshleger, Loth Specht, Wolfert Van Hemert, Noah Blisson, Peter Le Maistre, Diederick William Toderhorst, John Stephen Carbonell, and Misael alias Remon Malfalguerat, took the Oaths appointed, in order to their Naturalization.”

From the 1740s, if not earlier, he also operated as a wine merchant, becoming in 1759 an official purveyor of wine to the King [George II]. His descendants continued the wine business highly successfully for several generations. His main patron was John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland, to whom, in 1729, he dedicated his sole surviving music, a privately published set of twelve violin sonatas entitled Sonate da camera a violino e violone o cembalo (1729). Such is the musical quality of these sonatas that their neglect until very recently is hard to explain, but the rather grudging approval accorded to them by the historian Charles Burney (1789) and the lack of any further surviving works by Carbonelli may be the main causes. He lived from 1699 or 1700 to 1773.—Excerpted from Edition HH

According to the Museum of London, a wine bottle during the period in which Carbonella was a wine merchant looked something like this: